In a cloud computing environment, computing is delivered as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software and information are provided to computers and other devices as a metered service over a network, such as the Internet. In such an environment, computation, software, data access and storage services are provided to users that do not require knowledge of the physical location and configuration of the system that delivers the services.
In a virtualized computer environment, such as may be implemented in a cloud computing node of the cloud computing environment, the virtualized computer environment includes a virtual operating system. The virtual operating system includes a common base portion and separate user portions that all run on a physical computer. The physical computer is referred to as a host. The common base portion may be referred to as a hypervisor and each user portion may be called a guest. Each guest is a logical partition of physical resources of the computer. A guest operating system runs on each guest, and the guest appears to the guest operating system as a real computer. Each guest operating system may host one or more virtual machines.
Currently, the cloud computing nodes of the cloud computing environment may be connected to a storage system that includes a combination of Solid-State Drive (SSD) devices and Hard Disk Drive (HDD) devices. The controller of the storage system, commonly referred to as the storage controller, attempts to optimize the storage system by storing the most frequently accessed data in the SSD devices, which have a lower access time and latency than HDD devices but are more expensive. As a result, the storage controller stores infrequently accessed data to the HDD devices. However, such a storage policy prevents having unique data storage policies for particular data storage consumers. That is, there is no granularity of storage processing as consumers all have the same storage system processing policy. As a result, the current storage policy in a cloud computing environment is not an optimal way of storing data.